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Video: 75 years later, Earhart search continues

Closed captioning of: 75 years later, Earhart search continues

>>>finally tonight it has been 75 years since a remarkable life ended and an enduring mystery began. what happened to
amelia earhardt
? this week a new expedition departs from honolulu to perform a new kind of search, one that could perhaps finally answer the question. here's nbc's kristen dahlgren.

>>a lady adventurer, a heroin of the skies.

>> reporter: she was a pioneer of flight whose feats made imaginations soar.

>>i hope it will increase women in this in time.

>> reporter: in
1937amelia earhart
and her navigator set out to circle the globe.

>>contemplated about 27,000 miles.

>> reporter: she almost made it, an astonishing piece of flying from california to new guinea. but 75 years ago today over the remote
south pacificamelia earhart
disappeared. triggering a massive search and sparking one of the enduring mysteries of our time. her plane went down near a group of tiny,
uninhabited islands
. rick gillespie, who has devoted years to the search for
earhart
, believes she landed safely.

>>you think she was a castaway.

>>oh, yes. there is quite good evidence that she was a castaway.

>>excavations on this island have turned up products that appear to be manufactured in the u.s. in the
1930s
. a woman's compact, a
flight jacket
zipper, and a jar that may have once held freckle cream.

>>earhart
had freckles and didn't like her freckles.

>> reporter: add that to a newly discovered photo taken several months after
earhart
's disappearance that seems to show something.

>>it does appear we have a picture of a piece of debris from her airplane on the reef of this island.

>> reporter: armed with new,
deep water
submersibles and side scanning sonar technology, gillespie and his team will test their theory that
earhart
's plane was washed off the reef where it landed
into the depths
below. if they find anything on sonar, then this goes in the water, a specially designed
remote operated vehicle
that could give us our first clear pictures of
earhart
's plane in 75 years. skeptics say
earhart
crashed into the ocean elsewhere or that 75 years in churning seas would have broken up the plane. but researchers are confident. so if there is something out there?

>>we'll see.

>> reporter: a new team of explorers on the hunt for one of history's greatest adventurers and the answers that could finally put a mystery and a heroine to rest. kristen dahlgren,

Components of Amelia Earhart's plane might have floated for weeks in the waters of an uninhabited island in the southwestern Pacific republic of Kiribati, according to new analysis of a photograph taken three months after the disappearance of the glamorous aviator on July 2, 1937, during a record attempt to fly around the world at the equator.

Shot by British Colonial Service officer Eric R. Bevington in October 1937, during an expedition to assess the suitability for future settlement and colonization of Nikumaroro, a deserted island between Hawaii and Australia, the grainy photo has prompted a new expedition to find pieces of Earhart's long-lost Lockheed Electra aircraft.

"We will depart Honolulu on July 3rd aboard the University of Hawaii oceanographic research ship R/V Ka Imikai-O-Kanaloa. In about eight days we should get to Nikumaroro, where we will carry out a deep-water search for the wreckage," Ric Gillespie, executive director of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), told Discovery News.

The 26-day expedition and its findings will be captured by a film crew from Discovery Channel and aired as a documentary in August.

Archival research and a number of artifacts unearthed on Nikumaroro during nine previous archaeological expeditions have provided strong, circumstantial evidence for a castaway presence on the coral atoll.

Gillespie believes that Earhart's twin-engined plane did not crash in the Pacific Ocean, running out of fuel somewhere near her target destination Howland Island. Instead, he thinks Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan made an emergency landing on Nikumaroro's flat coral reef. There, they would have survived as castaways "for a matter of weeks, possibly more," said Gillespie.

The hunt for the plane wreckage will rely on robots and multi-beam sonar capable of mapping the seafloor at depths of almost 7 miles. The action will be on the reef slope off the west end of Nikumaroro, where waters can reach 5,000 feet. This is the area shown in Bevington's picture.

"The photo shows the western end of the island and the wreck of the British steamer SS Norwich City, which went aground on the island's reef in 1929," Gillespie said.

"But on the left side of the frame there is something else: an apparent man-made protruding object which is hard to explain in that spot," Gillespie said.

"The photo is wallet-size and, in the original print, the object of interest is smaller than a grain of rice and easily missed," he added.

Indeed, the mysterious object went unnoticed until 2010, when TIGHAR forensic imaging specialist Jeff Glickman spotted it while reviewing the original copy-negative.

"When we plotted the location, we realized it was in the same place where, in 1999, a former resident of Nikumaroro (a colony was established on the island in December of 1938 and lasted until 1963), told us of seeing debris in 1940. Her father, the island carpenter, told her it was the wreckage of an airplane," Gillespie said.

Courtesy of TIGHAR

This grainy photo has prompted a new expedition to find pieces of Earhart's long-lost Lockheed Electra aircraft.

A high-resolution scan of the original print, now kept at the Rhodes House Library at Oxford, U.K., allowed Glickman to carry out a more detailed analysis of the photo.

"There is an object on the reef, but from the picture we can’t definitely prove what it is. However, one interpretation is consistent with four components that existed on Earhart’s Lockheed Electra Model 10E Special," Glickman said presenting his findings last month at an Amelia Earhart conference.

According to Glickman, the object in the image could be a composition made from the upside-down landing gear of Earhart's plane: a floating wheel, the fender, the strut and a worm gear.

"Imagery analysts at the U.S. State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, who examined the photo, agreed with Glickman’s analysis. All the four elements appeared to match the shape and dimensions of the components in the landing gear of a Lockheed Electra," Gillespie said.

Previous expeditions have confirmed that there is nothing remaining in the location on the reef edge where the object appears in the 1937 Bevington photos.

"However, there are grooves in the reef surface where debris could easily have once been caught," Gillespie said.

He admits that there are several possible scenarios that could defeat TIGHAR's efforts to find the wreckage. For example, the plane could have floated away for miles before sinking, or it could have broken up, sunk close to the island and been buried by underwater landslides.

The underwater search will begin with a mapping of the general area with multi-beam sonar. Targets will be identified using high-resolution, side-scan sonar mounted on an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV). Finally, a Remote Operated Vehicle (ROV) with powerful lights and high-definition video cameras will be used to investigate the targets.

"If we are fortunate enough to find whatever remains of the airplane, we will get imagery and photographs and then prepare a recovery expedition," Gillespie said.

"Our hope is that finding identifiable pieces of the plane will help make it possible to do further archaeology on shore to learn more about Amelia's last days," he said.